Romney's Clinton strategy

Seeking to attract Democrats and independents who supported the last Democratic president, Romney has taken to lavishing praise at every turn on Clinton’s boom-era ’90s policies while contrasting them unfavorably with President Barack Obama’s old-school, Big Government ways.

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The tactic is designed to drive a wedge between the group of Democrats who supported Obama during the epic 2008 primary battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton: the white, working-class voters who hold the key to many swing states, like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

It’s also a simple way for Romneyland to poke a stick in the eye of Team Obama, using one of its most prominent surrogates but a man who has had a complicated personal history with Obama.

According to 2008 exit polls, Obama won self-described moderates by 21 points but lost white voters who made less than $50,000 by 4 percentage points. The same group of Bill Clinton Democrats could be Obama’s Achilles’ heel in 2012 as he fights to win them back. Romney is leading among white, working-class men in polls — though the president is leading among women — while POLITICO’s latest battleground poll showed Romney leading by 10 points among independents.

Republican strategists argue that Romney’s sudden affinity for Clinton comes at an opportune moment for the likely GOP presidential nominee. The Republican has a chance to argue that Obama is more liberal than some voters on key issues like same-sex marriage, deficit spending and health care reform. Laying claim to the Clinton legacy also allows Romney to move to the center after being forced to tack right in the GOP primary.

Chip Saltsman, who ran Mike Huckabee’s 2008 campaign, said Romney is making a play for moderate voters in states like North Carolina and Virginia who may be turned off by Obama’s embrace of same-sex marriage.

“Those voters are in play right now, and as we’ve seen, the polls flux and ebb and flow. Both campaigns are trying to figure out how to lock them down,” Saltsman said.

But veterans of the Clinton administration warn that Romney’s love letters to the former president — who has appeared at fundraisers and in TV ads for Obama — could backfire with voters.

“Maybe it’s a good one-liner for today, though I’m not sure that the public doesn’t see through it,” said John Podesta, who was a White House chief of staff under Clinton and co-chaired Obama’s transition team. “All it does is, in the long term, all it will do is elevate President Clinton’s views of the economy.”

Clinton, Podesta noted, raised taxes in office, which administration veterans credit for boosting the ‘90s economy for which Romney claims to be nostalgic.

“If he’d be for what Clinton was for, maybe that would help him,” Podesta said. “If [voters] think back to those days, and if they look at what Romney is proposing, it’s exactly the opposite of what Clinton did in office.”